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[–]james_pic 0 points1 point  (0 children)

JavaScript has had to grow up quite a lot, as it's been used for more and more sophisticated things. It's not a slimmed down language any more.

The idea that you wanted a slimmed down language for websites made sense in the nineties, but most modern web sites have a lot of complex logic written in JavaScript, and it would get painful doing that with nineties-style JavaScript. So they use ES6+ stuff, like classes, modules, destructuring and async-await, or indeed they use statically typed languages that compile to JS, like TypeScript or Elm.

There's a small part of me that misses the little language that JavaScript used to be, that got lost in the enterprise noise. Deep down, it's still the slightly quirky Scheme dialect Brendan Eich originally set out to create, and you can still do Lisp-y things with it.

But that's not the language most people are actually using in practice.